Stephen R. Kappes, a legendary CIA clandestine operative, will become as soon as today the No. 2 at the agency in a move that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden hopes will lift morale there. Kappes’s top priority will be to help rebuild the agency’s human intelligence capabilities when the United States needs spies within the jihadist community and elsewhere.

Battered for past failures and downgraded as leader of the intelligence community, the CIA nonetheless has been given new authority as home of the National Clandestine Service, which under Hayden and Kappes will coordinate all overseas human intelligence carried out by U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon and FBI.

Kappes, who speaks Russian and Farsi, is a former Marine whose almost 25 years at the CIA included being station chief in Moscow and Kuwait and running operations against Iran. He returns to an agency whose clandestine service has been shaken by retirements and the resignations of senior-level case officers with years of experience in recruiting agents overseas.

…Kappes understands that problem firsthand, having just left a London-based security company, ArmorGroup International. It hires former intelligence people to operate its approximately $200 million a year in contracts with multinational companies and governments in Iraq and elsewhere. Kappes’s CIA salary, at about $165,000 a year, will be about half of what he received, not counting stock and options, as ArmorGroup’s chief operating officer.

…Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, is one of Kappes’s most vocal critics. Weldon criticizes what he calls Kappes’s failure to pursue the congressman’s view that a colleague of Manucher Ghorbanifar, one of the instigators of the Iran-contra affair, had important information on Iran’s nuclear program.
washingtonpost.com

The controversy erupted this spring after two campus periodicals reported that Cole was under consideration by Yale for a joint appointment in sociology and history. In an article in the Yale Herald, Campus Watch, a pro-Israel group that monitors scholars’ statements about the Middle East, was quoted as saying that Cole lacked a “penetrating mind,” and suggesting that Yale was “in danger of sacrificing academic credibility in exchange for the attention” Cole would generate. Alex Joffe, then the director of Campus Watch, told me Cole “has a conspiratorial bent…he tends to see the Mossad and the Likud under his bed.” For its part, the Yale Daily News twice featured attacks on Cole by former Bush Administration aide Michael Rubin, a Yale PhD associated with Campus Watch and the American Enterprise Institute. In an op-ed Rubin wrote, “Early in his career, Cole did serious academic work on the 19th century Middle East…. He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary.”

Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has always been important in Cole’s reading of the Middle East. Naturally, Israel is central to neocons, too. Michael Rubin accused Cole of missing the good news from Iraq and of being anti-Semitic. That charge was soon taken up in the Wall Street Journal and in the New York Sun. “Why would Yale ever want to hire a professor best known for disparaging the participation of prominent American Jews in government?” wrote two Sun co-authors. One of them, according to Scott Johnson, was a student of Alan Dershowitz’s at Harvard [ed. Mitchell Webber, a Yale graduate who is now a law student and a research assistant for Alan Dershowitz at Harvard Law School,]. The other is Johnson’s daughter, Eliana, then a Yale senior. After that article, Johnson, a Minneapolis lawyer and Dartmouth grad, wrote up the case on his blog, which describes itself as a friend of Israel, and attacked Cole as a “moonbat.”

Alex Joffe denies that a network went after Cole. “There wasn’t any organized opposition. It was a question of people becoming aware of it somehow and each getting in his two cents.” Asked about pot-stirrers, Johnson says, “I think if you look anywhere but Yale, you’d be making a mistake.”

Well, if this isn’t a network, neither are the professionals who exchange cards at New York parties. Joel Mowbray, a Washington Times columnist who has assailed the consideration of Cole, sent a letter to a dozen Yale donors, many of them Jewish, warning of Cole’s possible appointment. According to the Jewish Week, “Several faculty members said they had heard that at least four major Jewish donors…have contacted officials at the university urging that Cole’s appointment be denied.” Still, Johnson’s point is well taken. It must have been Yale insiders who got the news out to Cole’s enemies, as Cole’s appointment passed one after another of several institutional hurdles.
warrenreports.tpmcafe.com

Nasa is to press ahead with next month’s space shuttle launch against the advice of the agency’s chief safety officer and top engineer, who have warned that the same problems that doomed Columbia in 2003 could lead to another catastrophe.

The decision followed two days of “spirited discussion” among senior managers at Kennedy Space Centre about the risk of foam insulation falling from Discovery’s fuel tank and striking the shuttle during its planned lift-off on July 1.
guardian.co.uk

Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.

US forces in Iraq kept detainees with only bread and water for up to 17 days in 2004, a newly-released report says.

The Special Operations troops stripped inmates naked and drenched them with water before interrogation in overly air-conditioned rooms, it said.

The report, by Brig Gen Richard Formica, says troops were not to blame – they had received the wrong advice.
bbc.co.uk

The ‘wrong advice’ from whom, General Formica?

The government of Bolivia has announced a radical plan to reduce poverty and create employment in the poorest country in South America.

Almost $7bn (£3.8bn) will be invested in ambitious public works programmes.

The economic plan announced by Planning and Development Minister Carlos Villegas aims to create 100,000 jobs a year for the next five years.

It is the latest measure in a series implemented by President Evo Morales since taking office in January.

The people of South America, and especially Bolivia, have often heard their leaders promise to reduce poverty and create jobs.

But President Morales appears to mean it and many Bolivians believe what he says.

The money will come from the recently nationalised gas industry, supplemented by international lending and foreign investment.
bbc.co.uk

Peru still wary of Garcia’s past
Alan Garcia’s first term as president of Peru from 1985 to 1990 is now used by ardent free-marketeers as a textbook example of how to ruin a country’s economy.

And although he proclaims himself a changed man since those days, voters who saw him as the lesser of two evils will be hoping that his return to office will not be equally disastrous.

During Mr Garcia’s previous five years in power, prices went up by more than two million per cent as his government printed money to maintain high levels of public spending.

The ravages of chronic inflation took their toll on the currency, the inti, which was subsequently replaced by a new unit, the sol, at an exchange rate of a million intis to one sol.

During the same period, the number of Peruvians living in poverty went up by five million, rising from 41.6% to 55% of the population. Peru’s gross domestic product shrank by one-fifth.

Yup, and which of these two is ‘our man’ in the Andes?

Slum-dwellers who make up a third of the world’s urban population often live no better – if not worse – than rural people, a United Nations report says.
Anna Tibaijuka, head of the UN Habitat agency, urged governments and donors to take more seriously the problems of at least a billion people.

Worst hit is Sub-Saharan Africa where 72% of urban inhabitants live in slums rising to nearly 100% in some states.

If no action is taken, the world’s slum population could rise to 1.4bn by 2020.
bbc.co.uk

CARACAS, Venezuela.- Newspaper “Ahora” director, Jose Tovar, was assassinated in the Venezuelan capital, informed police.

The newspaper “Ahora” is known to be of pro-government tendency.

The head of homicides from the judicial police, Alexander Perez, declared that by the position in which the corpse was found and the angle the bullets entered the victimÍs body is presumed that the perpetrator traveled with Tovar in his car at the time the homicide took place.

“Robbery is discarded as a motive according to the number of shots fired at Tovar”, said the police commissioner.

The police force is looking for TovarÍs security escort whom apparently, was not with him at the time.

Venezuela is rated third for homicides in Latin America, behind Colombia and El Salvador, according to the 2005 report from the Pan-American Health Organization.
dominicantoday.com

The African Union and western diplomats are meeting to discuss sending peacekeepers to Somalia, following recent advances by an Islamic militia.

The Islamists, who control the capital Mogadishu, fiercely oppose the idea and last week held large protests.

The only place safe enough for peacekeepers would be Baidoa, where the interim government is based.

Before any peacekeepers were deployed, the UN would have to lift it arms embargo, reports the AP news agency.

The government initially welcomed the Islamists’ victory against warlords but the peacekeeper issue has divided them.
bbc.co.uk

Mogadishu’s modest Islamic leader
It was the abduction of one of his 12-year-old pupils that prompted Somali schoolteacher Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed to take a stand against the warlords who have ruled the capital, Mogadishu for the last 15 years.

Gee, he doesn’t sound like a rabid ‘Islamist’ al Qaeda dude to me…

cairo ´ The true identity of Abu Ayyub Al Masri, the man said to have succeeded the slain Abu Musab Al Zarqawi as leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, remains an enigma in his reported homeland of Egypt.

‘His real name is Yussef Al Dardiri, he is around 38 years old and he comes from Upper Egypt,’ Montasser Al Zayat, a lawyer and former member of the Islamist group Gamaa Islamiya, said.

But Egyptian security sources insist they have not heard of the name.

‘The Egyptian security services have not heard of any Egyptian by this name, but since his name has been released, we are researching and investigating the matter, a security source said.

Diaa Rashwan, an expert on political Islam at Cairo’s Al Ahram Centrefor Strategic Studies, said he too had not come across the name. ‘There is no trace of such a name in the Egyptian radical Islamic files,’ he said.

The US military on Thursday released pictures of the Egyptian who it said was the successor of Zarqawi, who was killed in a US air strike north of Baghdad on June 7. Coalition forces spokesman Major General William Caldwell said the new leader, Abu Ayyub Al Masri, also known as Sheikh Abu Hamza AlMuhajer, was believed to be operating out of Baghdad.
thepeninsulaqatar.com

US and Iraqi forces were surrounding the Sunni rebel bastion of Ramadi with new checkpoints on all the town’s entry and exit roads as Al-Qaeda said it carried out Baghdad bombings that killed 36 people.

A US military spokesman said security forces surrounded Ramadi, capital of the western Al-Anbar province, in a bid to bottle up the insurgents.

He said extra checkpoints were set up “to restrict the flow of insurgents, but citizens will still be able to enter and leave the city.”

“This is just one part of a long-term plan to restore stability in Ramadi,” he told AFP.

He said the operation was “part of the continuous operations that the coalition forces and Iraqi forces have been conducting for several months.”

But on Sunday the forces were “getting more into it and focusing on multiple sites used by the insurgents to plan and conduct terrorist attacks and store weapons.”

The operation was being conducted jointly by US soldiers, marines and Iraqi troops, with the US military’s 1st Brigade of the 1st armored division acting as lead unit.

He said the forces had set up assembly areas for displaced people from the town to the east and west of Ramadi, but added: “We have no idea how many people have left their homes.”

Earlier Sunday the military insisted that it had neither launched “any major operation as Fallujah” nor deployed additional troops to the restive city after the BBC reported overnight troop movements on its southern outskirts.
sgnews.yahoo.com